When Kindergarten Meets Bohemia
by PandaFire McMango
Summary: Your typical kindergartan story: the RENT folks as five year olds. This is very wacked and please don't be offened the total idiocy of it. Thank you.


**This is a small "Rent-cast-as-kids" fic. I'm sorry, but i had to write JUST one. This is it, I swear.**

"Whatcha makin', Mark?" Roger Davis peeped curiously over his best friend's shoulder. Mark Cohen, his big glasses wobbling dangerously on his five-year-old nose, sighed exasperatedly.

"I don't know…but it's big," he added, piling more clay onto the wet mass of runny rainbow colors in front of him. Mark loved when the teacher left the room and he could get at the clay. It just wasn't as fun to play with when it was dry and you had to pile it on the uneven wooden desks. The flat, shiny floors were much better, and Roger had helped him dump a cup of water on the clay. Now it was delightfully wet and mushy. Mark happily slapped some orange goop on. Roger stuck his thumb in his mouth and watched with giant eyes.

"Ooooh! I want some clay!" There was a squeal, and all of a sudden Maureen Johnson, tiny and compact, threw herself at Mark, trying to steal some clay but really just knocking him backwards. The two rolled across the floor, shrieking and yelling. Mimi Marquez, who had been happily twirling in circles while screeching the Barney Clean Up song, wailed as Maureen's foot banged into her shiny purple skirt, which she had worn that day to show off just how _very_ shiny it was.

"You methed up my thkirt! You methed up my thkirt!" she shouted, falling into a lisp as she always did when worked up. Angel Dumott Schunard, who had been painstakingly using a red marker to give a baby doll lipstick, dropped the doll and hurried over to Mimi, who was stamping her feet angrily.

"It's still pretty, don't worry," Angel assured her. Mimi shook her head angrily.

"No! It ithn't pretty! It'th all methed up!" Across the room, Roger hugged his blanket (patterned with electric guitars and lightning bolts) to his chest and whispered around his thumb, "I think it's pretty…" No one heard him. No one _ever_ heard Roger. And you could hardly hear anything anyway, since Mark and Maureen's shrieks were filling the air. They finally came to rest over in the reading corners, with Maureen sitting on top of Mark and holding him down with her elbows. Mark squirmed, but she wouldn't let him go.

"Gimme some clay!" she whined. Mark shook his head.

"Get off me, you big…big…MEANIE!" Mark burst into tears. His glasses dangled from one ear, and there were smears of orange on his face from the clay he had been holding. Joanne Jefferson, who was sitting placidly in the corner and looking at the pictures in "The Little Engine That Could", stuck out her tongue at Maureen.

"Make him stop crying, it hurts my head!" Maureen glared at her.

"Shut up!" Immediately, there was a gasp from around the classroom. Maureen had uttered the phrase that the teacher had solemnly told them must _never_ be said.

"Ooooooooh, you're gonna be in troooooooouuuuuble…" said Mimi, her eyes wide. Angel, who had been brushing Mimi's skirt free of wrinkles, giggled in awe of the law-breaking Maureen. Mark, who had ceased crying, stared up at her. Maureen herself seemed vaguely shocked, as though surprised that a bolt of lightning had struck her by now. Everyone seemed to have forgotten that the teacher wasn't actually around at the moment.

"ICE CREEEEAAAM!" The shout rang from the top of the teacher's desk. Tommy Collins, his tiny knit cap askew, was triumphantly holding a box of ice cream sandwiches over his head. He was grinning widely, proudly displaying the gap in his teeth where he had lost his first tooth three days ago.

The other kids immediately forgot whatever they were doing and swarmed the desk that Tommy stood on. He tossed down sandwiches like a god bestowing miracles upon his creations. Within a minute, everyone was sitting on the ground, contentedly stuffing ice cream in their mouths (or in Maureen's case, stuffing some of it in her mouth and carefully smearing the rest in Joanne's hair when she wasn't looking).

"Tommy, where'd you find 'em?" asked Mark, licking his fingers. Tommy grinned again, his teeth stained with chocolate.

"There's a whole bunch of boxes in the closet. They're in this 'fridgerator as small as me!" Mark stared at him in wonder. So did all the others.

"A 'fridgerator as small as you?" said Roger softly, his eyes wide. Tommy nodded wisely, a crusader telling his friends about his magnificent adventures.

"Yeah! And there's other stuff too! I found a whole lot of crayons!"

"Crayons?" gasped Mimi.

"And whistles!"

"Whistles?" Joanne whispered.

"And a biiiiig elephant!"

"A elephant?" shrieked Maureen. Tommy giggled.

"No. There's no elephant." Maureen stamped her feet in rage.

"I want a elephant! I want a elephant! I want a—" One the third stamp of her feet, she stepped on a pool of melted ice cream. Her foot zoomed out from under her and she flipped into the air, landing smack on her bottom. Everyone giggled crazily, most of all Maureen herself. Angel brushed crumbs of chocolate off his lap and stared wonderingly at Tommy.

"Was it scary back there? It looks dark…" Tommy shook his head, putting on a brave face.

"Nope. It was really dark and there were spider webs and bats and creepy _monsters_…but I wasn't scared!" Angel's gaze became reverent.

"Wow…you're so brave…" Tommy blushed happily and looked down. Just then, they heard a shout. Maureen had been sneaking up on Mark's tower of wet clay. He had spotted her in the nick of time.

"That's MINE!" he yelled, running to protect his treasure. She grumbled, "That's not fair," and pouted. Then all of a sudden, Maureen grabbed a handful of clay and pitched it at Mark. It hit him smack in the face, and he toppled backwards. For a moment he lay still. Then he got tremblingly to his feet, yellow-green clay slowly dripping off his face. Maureen stared; she seemed to have gone too far, even by kindergarten rules.

And then Mark threw a handful of purple mush at her.

It was on. The kids swarmed the clay, flinging at each other and ceiling and the walls and everything else imaginable. Roger got up the courage to throw some at Mimi; she jumped on him and began stuffing clay into his face. Joanne got Maureen in the face with a particularly slimy clump of blue clay. Within seconds, the two were mud wrestling—or clay wrestling—in a slippery pile of colors. Angel and Tommy took great pleasure in pelting each other with handfuls of whatever color of the clay they could find. Mark went berserk and started whipping clay every which way. Eventually, the seven kindergarteners were jumped onto each other and were one big rainbow mass of shrieks and squirming bodies.

"OH MY LORD!" The shout stopped them cold. In the doorway stood the teacher, her mouth open and her eyes wide as baseballs. Holding her hand was little Benny Coffin, who she had brought to the nurse for allergy treatment (he was allergic to dogs, and Maureen had shoved her sweater, coated with fur from her Great Dane, in his face earlier).

"Oh—oh my—what happened?" the teacher asked weakly. No one had an answer. Finally Maureen pushed Joanne and Roger off of her and walked over to the teacher, her face the picture of innocence.

"We're having a party. A birthday party for…Roger." Roger, who was flopped wetly on the ground, his clothes and face stained with color, blinked in surprise. Maureen went over to him and kicked him. He got up slowly and nodded.

"It's my birthday…the, um, eleventy-third of…winter?" The teacher just stared. Everyone stared. Roger cringed. He hated staring.

"It was Roger's idea! He wanted us to have a party for him, so we said yes…sorry we didn't tell you," Maureen said sweetly. The teacher mouthed wordlessly, her eyes moving from the clay-spattered walls and ceiling to the melted ice cream smeared over her desk to the children themselves, who looked like rainbow slime monsters. Then she looked at Roger.

"Roger Davis, did you start this?" Roger stared at her. Then slowly, his orange thumb drifting towards his mouth, he nodded. And tiny Roger, standing there without his blanket, swore to himself that from now on, he was NEVER going to say another word to Maureen Johnson.

And hell if that didn't work out.

**Roger, Roger, Roger...**


End file.
